The Geography Of Russia’s IQ

Human capital (primarily education) is the single most important factor behind long-term productivity gains, and hence economic growth. The relatively high human capital of Russia and China, which is comparable to developed country levels, is the most important reason why I rate their future prospects much higher than those of the other two BRIC’s, Brazil and India.

But the internal distribution of human capital is also very important. For instance, in Italy there is an almost perfect correlation between regional PISA scores in Math and Science, and regional GDP’s. I have long wanted to find a similar data set for Russia, and I finally did so today in Jarkko Hautamäki’s slideshow comparing regional PISA performance in Finland and Russia. Based on the figures there I estimated the PISA scores (Math and Science) for Russia’s regions and compiled the map below.

The results by each of the 44 Russian regions which participated in PISA are reproduced below*:

Region

PISA 2009

Moscow

546

Saint-Petersburg

519

Tyumen oblast

506

Novosibirsk

502

Chelyabinsk oblast

499

Omsk oblast

497

Samara oblast

496

Vladimir oblast

494

Tula oblast

492

Karelia

489

Tatarstan

489

Komi

488

Tomsk oblast

488

Primorsky krai

483

Krasnoyarsk

482

Chuvashia

482

Udmurtia

478

Sakhalin oblast

477

Saratov oblast

475

RUSSIA

475

Tambov oblast

474

Moscow oblast

472

Volgograd oblast

471

Vologda oblast

470

Kemerovo oblast

470

Altai krai

468

Astrakhan oblast

467

Ryazan oblast

466

Kursk oblast

465

Khanty-Mansiysk

463

Bashkortostan

458

Krasnodar

457

Perm krai

457

Rostov oblast

457

Nizhny Novgorod

456

Voronezh oblast

453

Orenburg oblast

453

Kaluga oblast

446

Sverdlovsk oblast

446

Ulyanovsk oblast

445

Adygea

443

Stavropol

441

Mari El

436

Dagestan

426

Chita oblast

425

Sakha (Yakutia)

419

There are any numbers of comments one can make, but I will confine myself to the most important ones:

(1) In some regions, margins of error are high, as samples were low. Nonetheless, it is still possible to identify concrete patterns.

(2) Moscow pupils performed very well, at the level of the highest scoring OECD countries like Finland, Taiwan, and Korea. This is especially impressive considering the significant numbers of immigrants in that city from the North Caucasus and Central Asia, who come from poorly-scoring countries and rarely have good Russian.

(3) St.-Petersburg and Tyumen oblast performed above the OECD average, while a few other regions performed at or only slightly below the OECD average.

(4) Among ethnic Russian republics, Siberian regions performed well, while the Urals and southern regions performed badly.

(5) Performance in ethnic minority republics differs dramatically. Many of the Turkic and Finno-Ugric regions, such as Tatarstan, Komi, Chuvashia, and Karelia did well; however, Mari El is a big exception. The Buddhist peoples of Asia, such as Chita oblast (now merged into Zabaykalsky Krai) and the Sakha Republic, performed relatively poorly, as did the Muslim North Caucasus region of Dagestan. Extrapolating from Dagestan, Chechnya would probably score around 400, i.e. like Brazil.

Bear these figures in mind when considering long-term investments into Russia alongside with their business climate, corruption levels, etc.

Finally, there is a table below comparing individual Russian regions with countries around the world. (The Ukraine didn’t participate in PISA 2009, but extrapolating from its TIMMS scores, its rating should be around 454. The OECD average is about 500.) I have bolded countries and Russian regions which are especially useful, in my opinion, for comparative purposes.

Region

PISA 2009

China: Shanghai

588

Hong Kong

552

Singapore

552

Finland

548

Moscow

546

Korea

542

China

537

Japan

534

Chinese Taipei

532

Canada

528

Liechtenstein

528

New Zealand

526

Switzerland

526

Netherlands

524

Australia

521

Estonia

520

Saint-Petersburg

519

China: Macao

518

Germany

517

Belgium

511

Slovenia

507

Tyumen oblast

506

United Kingdom

503

Novosibirsk

502

Iceland

502

Poland

502

Denmark

501

Chelyabinsk oblast

499

Norway

499

France

498

Ireland

498

Omsk oblast

497

Czech Republic

497

Hungary

497

Samara oblast

496

Austria

495

Sweden

495

United States

495

Vladimir oblast

494

Slovak Republic

494

Tula oblast

492

Portugal

490

Karelia

489

Tatarstan

489

Komi

488

Latvia

488

Tomsk oblast

488

Luxembourg

487

Italy

486

Spain

486

Lithuania

484

Primorsky krai

483

Krasnoyarsk

482

Chuvashia

482

Udmurtia

478

Sakhalin oblast

477

Saratov oblast

475

Russia

475

Tambov oblast

474

Croatia

473

Moscow oblast

472

Volgograd oblast

471

Vologda oblast

470

Kemerovo oblast

470

Greece

468

Altai krai

468

Astrakhan oblast

467

Ryazan oblast

466

Kursk oblast

465

Khanty-Mansiysk

463

Malta

462

Bashkortostan

458

Krasnodar

457

Perm krai

457

Rostov oblast

457

Nizhny Novgorod

456

Voronezh oblast

453

Orenburg oblast

453

Israel

451

Turkey

450

Kaluga oblast

446

Sverdlovsk oblast

446

Ulyanovsk oblast

445

Adygea

443

Serbia

443

Stavropol

441

Mari El

436

Chile

434

Bulgaria

434

United Arab Emirates

430

Romania

428

Uruguay

427

Dagestan

426

Chita oblast

425

Thailand

422

Costa Rica

420

Sakha (Yakutia)

419

Mauritius

419

Mexico

418

Malaysia

413

Trinidad & Tobago

412

Venezuela

410

Moldova

405

Kazakhstan

403

Azerbaijan

402

Montenegro

402

Jordan

401

Brazil

396

Argentina

395

Colombia

392

Tunisia

386

Albania

384

Indonesia

377

Georgia

376

Qatar

374

Panama

368

Peru

367

India

341

Kyrgyzstan

331

* Methodological note: In reality, the figures given were for all three components of PISA (i.e., Reading, as well as Math and Science). I just assumed there is a perfect correlation in relative performance in Reading as compared to Math and Science (a valid one, I think, as the cross-national evidence indicates this relation is very close), and adjusted from Russia’s Math and Science score. The reason is for the Russian figures to have compatibility with my Human Capital Index, which is the average of PISA and/or TIMSS Math & Science scores.

Comments

1. It is trite and probably not very meaningful to point out that Moscow and St. Petersburg have a bigger combined population than do Sweden and Finland. However a big foreign investor wanting to take advantage of high PSI might bear that in mind particularly as labour costs are likely to be much lower than in Scandinavia and Moscow and St. Petersburg can also draw on the resources of the rest of the country for better economies of scale in a way that Scandinavia cannot. If there is a deterrent factor it is probably corruption with another chart you posted on your facebook page suggesting that corruption is a particular problem in Moscow and St. Petersburg. It might be an idea for the government to try to focus anti corruption efforts especially in the two capitals, which in all other respects look like very attractive investment destinations. A strong marketing campaign (something Russia is generally very poor at) pointing to the attractive investment potential in the two capitals would also be a good idea.

2. I notice that there is no data from a surprising number of the country’s western regions. Since based on the data elsewhere PSI scores seem generally higher in the country;s western regions I wonder whether the omission of data from these regions might depress the country’s overall figure. In every other respect the distribution is pretty much as I would have expected.

3. I am sure I am not the only person who is a little skeptical at the very high results not so much of Shanghai but of China generally, though I have to say that I suspect that even the Shanghai results may be too high. By contrast I am astonished at Israel’s very low ranking. I wonder why that should be? Presumably the growing proportion of the population who are Sephardic and Orthodox Jews has a part to play but I would have expected the immigration that took place from Russia to have provided a balance.

(1) The higher skills levels of the two capitals is already balanced out by their higher salaries. Hence, in many cases there are still incentives to reallocate production to places like Kaluga (becoming Russia’s Detroit), just like in North America a lot of manufacturing has been relocating to lower-IQ / poorer places like the South and Mexico.

Incidentally, I think another important impact of these regional scores is that it should finally demolish the myth that Moscow is some kind of colonialist cancer on Russia, sucking in resources from the rest of the country. Muscovites live better (even after contributing generously to net transfers) because of the simple fact they are cleverer, draw the most talented people from all provinces, and enjoy higher salaries thanks to that.

(2) As regards corruption, the map in question is here. Moscow and St.-Petersburg are indeed very corrupt, as is South Russia and the Caucasus. That said, the fact that Russians in the big cities have more contacts with police and officials than in the more rural parts of the country could also play a role.

(3) It’s hard to say. If everyone was included, there’d also be Tyva and Buryatia, and the other North Caucasus republics. Average results would still probably go up, but not drastically. Maybe by 5 points.

According to statistics from the Unified State Exam (which are only available by federal okrug, unfortunately, not oblast). The Central region, North-West and Volga regions perform well; the Urals lags behind a bit; while the Far East, Siberian, and Southern do the worst. (In this sense, the very adequate results achieved in the Siberian regions in PISA are a bit puzzling… The Buryats, Altays, and Tuvans may drag down the average a bit, but they constitute less than 10% of the population).

Still, if Unified State Exam results are at least moderately correlated with PISA results, then the inclusion of more regions from the Center and the North-West should bump up the scores. (However, here’s another relevant question: To what extent are USE exams inflated by greater than average performance by Muscovites (25% of the Center’s population) and St.-Petersburgers (33% of the North-West’s population)?

I don’t know how well you know China but I do find it difficult to believe that its PSI ranking can be higher (and indeed in some cases much higher) than those of Switzerland, Austria, Germany and Sweden. There are (large) parts of China where that may be true and there are of course some metropolitan centres (Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Tianjin, Nanjing etc) where it very probably is true but I struggle to believe it can be true of China as a whole.

(1) Israel is indeed a very puzzling case. Jews by stereotype are clever. Ashkenazi IQ tends to be very high, and they make up a majority in Israel (although perhaps not the majority of school-children, thanks to greater fertility among Haredim, settlers, and Arabs). From my casual perusal of the data, my estimate is that secular Ashkenazi Jews in Israel (probably less intelligent than Ashkenazi Jews in the US) is about equal to that of typical European countries like the UK or Germany, which is consistent with Lynn’s estimate of an Ashkenazi Israeli IQ of 104 (as compared with 113 in Europe/the US). This figure nationally is dragged down by the 400-ish results of the Arabs (these countries tend to score 350-400) and the children of Jewish fundamentalists like the Haredim and settlers.

But why are even Israeli Jews less clever (as implied by PISA and IQ scores) than in places like the US? I don’t know. Perhaps there was some kind of selection at work when Israel was established. The commentator Glossy had one possible explanation: “Presumably because the prospect of tilling land in a kibbutz or going out on patrols with an Uzi had low appeal to the smarter segments of the Ashkenazi community.” Indeed, my own impression is that among Jews who were academics in the USSR, the vast bulk went to the US and Western Europe, not Israel, once emigration restrictions were loosened.

(2) Overall, I find myself trusting the China scores, incredible as they appear at first glance.

PISA has stringent measures to avoid cheating. And China registered no problems in that regard (unlike, say, Azerbaijan, but that didn’t stop it from doing crap; kind of like United Russia in the last elections))).

Second, IQ tests (which are closely correlated with PISA), have suggested that Shanghai and neighboring Zhejiang region are the cleverest regions of China. Many other regions are only modestly above the OECD mean. This is entirely consistent with the pattern of results from China, in which Shanghai and Zhejiang did stupendously well, the poorer ethnic Chinese regions (as well as regions with substantial minority populations) scored much closer to the OECD average.

Third, we know that Hong Kong, Singapore (with a substantial minority population!), Taiwan (with a substantial aborigine population) do brilliantly on these tests. This is not going into the fact that southern Chinese tend to be slightly less intelligent than northerners as per IQ tests. So I expect that the results are more or less reliable. They might be slightly skewed, as the two best regions (Shanghai and Zhejiang) are included, so the average may drop in the future as more provinces (this time there were 12) participate; however, not by much, as in the poorest provinces, poor school quality and malnutrition may still be having a significant downwards effect.

I find a high mean IQ for China plausible, certainly for southern China. It’s my impression that Chinese-Americans are representative of the southern provinces. I don’t think they disproportionally descend from Chinese intelligentsia or from wealthy Chinese. And we know that Chinese-Americans are smart.

Two adjustments are necessary. First, this category would also include Vietnamese, Thais, etc. who have somewhat lower IQ’s, so Chinese-Americans in particular would likely score higher, maybe 550 or 560. This is comparable to Shanghai (!) but on the other hand, Chinese Chinese seem to be hurt by the Hanzi system (hence probably why their M&S scores are so much higher than their R scores unlike the case for most other countries). As Chinese-Americans use English, their scores for M&S will be similar to R, also 550 let’s say.

That’s basically like Hong Kong or Singapore. Which makes sense.

You’re correct that the bulk of Chinese are from the southern provinces. However, these places aren’t especially clever; other IQ tests in China suggest that the best region is Shanghai, closely followed by Zhejiang and Beijing. Which is logical – both metropolises have been massive magnets for cognitive elites for centuries. The original core of the Chinese-American population were poor laborers from Guangdong, a region that has relatively low IQ by Chinese standards, however from the 50’s they were swamped by new arrivals from China (wealthy, coastal from Guangdong to Shanghai, fleeing Communists) and later from other parts of Asia as the Chinese diasporas where persecuted (wealthy, mostly southern Chinese).

So given their profile above, their performance of 550-560 is entirely consistent with those of genetically (and in terms of cultural heritage) similar Chinese in Singapore and Hong Kong. Taiwan does worse (532) but that may be ascribed to an aborigine population, as well as to the fact that East Asian curriculums tend to be less well adapted to the PISA test than Western ones.

I’ve heard that many Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews live in poverty in Israel and other countries due to several factors that all feed into one another to form a vicious circle: the men are expected by their community and teachers to spend their time in religious study and are discouraged from acquiring practical knowledge and skills that would enable them to hold a job; they also marry very young, often as teenagers, to equally teenage brides usually selected for them by their teachers or rabbis with the result that the couples become dependent on social welfare (or the wife has to work); they usually have very large families and the children may become malnourished. The social welfare net in Israel has been progressively weakened over the years so it’s likely Haredi Jews are subsisting on smaller welfare payment amounts now than in the past. Being malnourished and growing up in a home environment that discourages any learning or knowledge other than religious knowledge are sure to have an adverse effect on a child’s intelligence and intellectual achievements.

Teachers in Israel don’t earn very high salaries and education in that country has been subjected to government spending cutbacks.

Everything I’ve been able to find and read about Israel suggests a society that is becoming more and more unequal with most of its wealth being concentrated among a few rich families and more people becoming poorer (over 30% of Israeli children already live in poverty) as the government spends less and less on education, health and social services. In 2010, the richest 20 families in Israel controlled a quarter of the country’s top companies and half the stock market through a network of companies that minimise their own monetary investments. Israel, the only Middle Eastern democracy? – that’s a joke. We can expect that in years to come, Israeli school students will fall further in their PISA scores if present trends continue.

I should say that when I spoke about investing in Moscow and St. Petersburg I was thinking more of what you might call “knowledge economy” investment rather than industrial investment. It seems to me that there is a big potential there. Apart from obvious fields such nanotechnology one surely promising area would be industrial design, a field where the Germans and the Scandinavians have traditionally excelled. A good way on capitalising on the resources of the country would be to focus design in Moscow whilst having the production elsewhere in the way that MiG and Sukhoi aircraft were designed in Moscow but were built elsewhere. The high score also suggests that the government’s plans to develop Moscow into a financial centre are not fanciful.

minor quibble re #5: not much Buddhism in Yakutia. Most people are nominally Orthodox Christian or shamanist. And it’s too bad that Kalmykia (the other major centre of Buddhism besides Buryatia) didn’t participate. I’m really curious if all the chess-playing helps.

Hello! I know over 10 provinces in China participated the PISA 2009 test, but I have never seen their scores besides Shanghai’s. Could you let me know where did you get the information about China’s score? Thanks!

This is very interesting. Why is Tyumen oblast so high on the list? Is it because oil exploration has attracted a lot of engineers and skilled workers to it? I guess the oil industry pays well and money attracts talent.

I would bet that before 1918 St. Petersburg beat Moscow easily. In my time the gap between central Moscow, which had less than 10% of the city’s population, and the rest of the city must have been huge, perhaps larger than the gap between Moscow as a whole and the rest of the country. I remember a quiz-type TV show that pitted different Moscow schools against each other. The final matches were always between schools that had single- or double-digit numbers (school number 5 against school number 11, for example). I went to school number 636. The lower the number, the closer to The Center, or at least that’s what I assumed then. If things haven’t changed too much, all Putin has to do to beat Shanghai is redefine Moscow as the area within the Garden Ring.

Another huge status indicator was the length of time that one’s family had spent in Moscow. The people whose ancestors came to the city before the Revolution were universally assumed to be smarter and to have better manners. At the other end of the spectrum, “limitchik” was a school-yard taunt.

I was a sickly kid, so I spent a lot of time in Moscow’s hospitals. You could see kids from all over the country there. On two different occasions I met guys there who bragged that they had achieved perfect grades (all 5s) in a quarter. I had never seen anyone do that at MY school and I knew lots of kids at my school who seemed smarter than those two guys from the hospital. That experience introduced me to the idea that perhaps provincial schools had lower standards.

I’m not at all surprised that Moscow oblast scores below Russia as a whole. That agrees with my experiences of it back in those days. Looking further afield, I’m surprised by how poorly Georgia did. Perhaps there is a sampling problem there. Or maybe they’ve suffered horrible brain drain. I’m not surprised by the Estonia > Latvia > Lithuania relationship since I’ve heard of that stereotype before.

Is it because oil exploration has attracted a lot of engineers and skilled workers to it?

Maybe. But Khanty-Mansiysk, which is where the core of the oil industry is truly concentrated, has a rather uninspiring performance (463).

In general, resource windfalls don’t really tend to have a good effect on minds. Kuwaitis and Qataris perform worse than Syrians and Tunisians. Norwegians perform worse than Swedes. Etc.

Tyumen has a more value-added industrial activities (as opposed to purely oil and gas extraction in Khanty-Mansiysk, and its inhabitants are almost as rich. So their schools can be very generously funded. I imagine that once Russia reaches Western European levels of development, its PISA M&S results will converge to those of Tyumen, i.e. about 500-510.

That experience introduced me to the idea that perhaps provincial schools had lower standards.

I would tend to agree. That is why something like the ЕГЭ is really important for Russia even if people hate it.

Me too. I’d bet on brain drain myself. A huge proportion of the Georgian, Armenian, and Moldovan populations have left for greener pastures on a permanent or semi-permanent basis. I know they’re very poor and their schools have funding problems, but really, that’s very unlikely to explain results that are so so low relative to stereotypes (Georgians were one of the best educated peoples under Tsarism and the early USSR, after only Jews; Armenians are renowned for their intelligence; Moldovans are basically Romanians with a bit of Ukrainian, so their PISA result should be something like 450 not 400).

That said, not all is lost for them, as the genes behind IQ seem to be deeply recessive. Or else the Irish (in Ireland) would be all retards by now.

One reason for some ethnic regions performing badly is a heavy Russification policy by local governments. This is a case especially in Mari El Republic, where Mari speakers, some 50% of population, are according to several Human Rights organisations victims of apartheid-type of discrimination. Mari language education has suffered heavily in recent years (which wasn’t good to begin with, remembering that Russification began already in the Soviet times).

In 2007 Russia enacted a law that lets individual schools to decide themselves the language of education. This has led to dramatic consequences – most minority language schools switched to Russian overnight, denying many students their human right for education in their native language.

It is not about reading or bilingualism, it is about learning mathematical and other important skills through your native language. Education in your native lanuage is, afterall, a precondition for effective learning, and I guess most importantly, maintaining the cultural identity. This is why f. ex. Latvia, which hosts more national minorites than most European countries, provides education in all their national minority languages (Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Hebrew and Romani). Unfortenately Russia has chosen a different path – since September 2010 the “national component” was complitely eradicated from the Russia’s education standard. In the future differences between Russia’s regions are continuing to grow.

Chuvash people and Tatars are in absolute numbers and also relatively bigger groups in their respective federal subjects than Mari people. This has enabled them to resist Russification much more effectively, and childern there are not forced to learn in Russian first. But, as I said, after 2010 things have changed, and I’m expecting scores for all ethnic regions to drop.

If you are a smart kids, which i think you were, than it doesn’t matter so much because the teacher will need to explain it not ones but a few times for the less stellar kids in the class. The smart foreign kids may not get it the first time but they will after the second or third time. If on the other hand you are not one of the smart kids you would have needed the second or third time in your native tongue so you will miss that when teached in a non native langue

If I Google for current information about the ethnic Mari, there are lots of entries about how their human rights are violated but if I do the same for Mordvins, I don’t see anything similar. Yet Mordvins constitute less than half the population of Mordovia (just as the Mari are less than half of their titular republic) and they have a similar form of government as Mari El does. I understand the Mordvins are more or less split evenly between Erzya and Moksha, each group numbering about half a million, so the two groups are roughly similar in size to the ethnic Mari (about 600,000) and if they work together, they would have considerable political clout in Mordovia.

The reading (or skimming rather) I have done on what I can find about Mordovia and Mari El to me suggests that the Mordvins are comfortable with their President Nikolay Merkushkin whose wife is Erzya. His leadership style appears more conciliatory if unspectacular compared to the Mari El President Leonid Markelov. Also Merkushkin was an engineer before becoming a politician whereas Markelov was a lawyer and career politician and the difference in their backgrounds surely accounts for their leadership styles and how they have managed their republics’ economies; Markelov has been criticised for allowing Mari El’s economy to stagnate.

I’m guessing that Chuvashia, Udmurtia and Mordovia have better run economies and invest much more in education and social services than Mari El does and that people in Mari El are aware of what these other republics are doing and are complaining in ways that include ethnic and nationalist protest. The Mari also have a history of resisting Russian Orthodox Christianity and maintained their native religion in secrecy throughout Soviet rule and beyond, and that must account for their more aggressive nationalism. They may have contacts in Finland and Estonia as well and this in itself is a double-edged sword: these contacts could be encouraging them to use confrontationist methods and the local authorities end up using heavy-handed ways of dealing with them.

Don’t even try to project the shit your tribe does to minorities onto Russians. The extermination of aboriginal culture and language in Canada and the USA was real. Not only were the original inhabitants driven into tiny reservation ghettos where they live in 3rd world conditions today, but their children were forcefully removed into residential schools where they were severely beaten for speaking their own language and sexually abused as well. Nothing of the sort happened in Russia before 1917, during the USSR era and today. These “discriminated” against minorities have their own republics which operate in their own language. I dare you to post these “human rights” complaints here. Your cheesy, worse than North Korea style of propaganda doesn’t cut it here. I read the wikipedia page and it is obvious BS with broken links. Any twat can edit wikipedia pages and any anti-Russian outfit can claim a billion things about the Russian Federation. I want to see the Mari themselves voice their discontent. Surely western TV crews can film this discontent in action since they obviously can film discontent in Moscow and Vladivostok.

“International comparisons have shown that while the Russian comprehensive school provides a classical education, it does not teach children how to apply their knowledge. This being the case, schoolchildren receive a good education in many subjects but doing well outside of the classroom is another matter. Russian students fare particularly well in thenatural sciences according to the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). They are well-versed on theory and are imaginative, but not so practically orientated. This has been clearly demonstrated in international education comparisons.”

Well like international comparisons show Russian students are not able to put their skills in practice. This, together with other issues haunting Russia, like massive increase on defense spending at the expense of education, creeping corruption in the education system, a huge drop in number of pupils in the coming decade or so, does not bode well for Russia. Plus that many experts are saying that educational reform during 2000s has been an utter failure.

What I know of the Brazilian education system is that it is a complete mess, plagued even bigger regional and institutional differences than Russia. Still, it scores only 16% lower than Russia. If Brazlian politicians would make education a priority, which they have increasingly promised in the recent years, they would quickly catch up with Russia.

PISA revolves around “putting skills into practice.” This factor is already implicitly accounted for in the results.

If you want an example of a test where that is not the case, there is TIMMS (for M&S) and PIRLS (R), which are far more academically focused and largely reward students for mastering the subject matter. Or one can put it this way: PISA is much like an IQ test; TIMMS is more like a standard exam. In the last TIMMS, Russia scored 521, above the US’ 514. (In fact all post-Soviet and East European, and to a lesser extent East Asian, countries do better on TIMMS than on PISA. In most Western countries however, PISA and TIMMS scores are similar.)

As regards Brazil, first, a 16% disparity in mean scores is gargantuan. (Note that the disparity between Russia and highest-scoring Finland is 14%). Another way of putting that is to convert their PISA figures into IQ’s to get 96 for Russia and 85 for Brazil. Yet another way of putting that is that only 15.2% of Brazilian school-leavers possess skills beyond those needed for purely linear problem-solving, compared with 47.6% of Russian and 51.3% of American students (2006 figures, but 2009 will be similar).

Second, that is not going to happen unless Brazil’s politicians are magicians and can defy the experience of every single country in the world. In the decade that PISA has been run, there are very few cases of a country improving its position by more than 20 points or so; most stay still.

Also the Russian national research university ‘Higher school of economics’ disagrees with you:

“The study [PISA] showed that Russian school students have a fairly high level of knowledge in mathematics and natural sciences yet lag behind their peers in other countries in their ability to apply this knowledge in practice, work with different sources of information, and perform different productive activities such as expressing and supporting their points of view.”

Yes, I know I am, and that is indeed just the beginning of my disabilities.

Russia in an industrialized country, GDP per capita is much higher than that of Brazil, India or China. Nation-wide education has existed there for a long time, and her institutions and traditions have not been imposed by a foreign power. The performance of Russia in Pisa 2009 study is actually pretty grim reading. It shows that performance has stagnated over the last nine years, while countries that were performing at a similar level in 2000 have since moved on, and in the case of countries like Poland and Latvia, moved on dramatically. It is therefore perfectly logical to conclude that Russia has reached her almost maximum potential. In order to improve Russian students ability to put their skills in practice Russia needs to solve all other multiple problems that are savaging Russia.

Brazil, India or China on the other hand are developing countries who are just began to build their institutions. It is much more easier for Brazil to close the PISA gap to Russia than for Russia to improve to the level of Finland. Especially because Brazil is not as corrupted as Russia, has healthier demographics, more varied economy, better democracy and more press freedom, nicer climate…

To the contrary, a decade proves very little. Raising human capital is a generational process.

Even if Brazil raises its PISA rating by 20 points every decade, and Russia remains stagnant, it will take it until 2050 for its school-leavers to equalize with Russia’s. (Meanwhile, even then the bulk of the working population would still remain clearly sub-par, as indicated by PISA scores and far lower tertiary enrollment rates for those older cohorts). Full equalization across the entire working population even under these very, very generous conditions takes an entire century.

Meanwhile, there’s no reason that Russia cannot improve, if it can get its PISA scores to converge with its significantly higher TIMMS scores (which is essentially what Poland and Latvia started doing). The main change needed is a switch from classic schooling (as in the USSR) to more of an emphasis on creative problem-solving.

There is little question of Russia rising to 540+, due to its genetic ceiling, but somewhere in the 500-520 diapason is entirely realistic.

Your last points are bizarre, meaningless, self-refuting twaddle. If Brazil has such a great clean democracy and nice weather, why does it lag China by almost 150 points? I’ll answer that for you: Because those factors are irrelevant.

This is a somewhat minor point, but as I just took a course on data visualization, I thought I might throw a tip your way. When using color like you did on your map, it is almost always preferable to use multiple shades of the same hue rather than a palate of colors such as you used here. This would make comparison much easier. Although the red and green are prominent, everything in the middle gets muddled and difficult to distinguish because of the changing hues. The reader is forced to go back and forth from the key to the map, and the impact of the graphic is compromised. I think the map would look quite nice if it were all different shades of the same hue, except for the gray areas without data, of course.

Cheers, and keep up the good work! Thanks for provided an ‘alternative voice’ on Russian affairs.

Going back to the subject of China, here is an article by the US economist Dean Baker which also suggests as you did recently that the Chinese economy may already in some senses have surpassed that of the US. The article also echoes your view that China is much richer than many realise.

Interesting. Can we assume the difference with Ukraine’s score is an indication of how Russia has improved since the 90′ (if we consider Ukraine is still stuck in there) ?
Or maybe the gaps already existed within the USSR…

Ukraine’s estimated PISA score (=454, based on adjusting TIMMS) would not be out of place compared against the Russian southern steppe and Black Earth regions, which typically score 440-470. I think that’s the perspective it would be best to look at it from.

I am a Professor of Mathematics in one of the American Universities, but part of my education was in Russia, I graduated from the mathematics department in MGU Moscow. I also got a Ph.D. and MS in Engineering from US Universitries. My general impression is that US Bachelor’s degree in math and science corresponds to a Russian High School Diploma and American Ph.D. in Mathematics corresponds to about 2.5 years of Russian undergraduate studies in math. As a result of a shortage of the US born Engineering and Math Ph.D cadre, US is experiencing defense industry R&D problems, e.g. US is incapable of producing good defense (pardon American spelling everywhere) products and is running behind Russia in such important aspects as missiles, tanks and aircraft. US’ 5th generation fighter plane F22A has been taken off production by the US Senate in Dec. 2011 due to the fundamental design problems and F35, another 5th generation plane is inferior to the Russian 4th generation SU-35 in every regard, according to Australian experts who recommended their country not to buy F-35. Also, I have been studying much maligned Russian ЕГЭ mathematics exams (standard graduation exams in Russian High Schools). In my opinion, more than 90% of US University students wouldn’t be able to get a passing grade in math in that exam and overwhelming majority of US University Mathematics faculty would not be able to get a perfect score in it, some probably would flunk. Since Russians, apparently, are doing much better in math, I don’t agree with the math scores of US High School graduates given in this article. They would be nowhere near the ones in Russia. Your listing, in fact, indicates that US scores would be higher which is highly unlikely, given a tremendous advantage of Russian students over American ones.

Education in the Soviet Union emphasized problems solving requiring intelligence and creativity. US education emphasizes learning by rote and repetition without appealing to intelligence. There is little in America that challenges the mind. The reason is a long policy of US government to produce a nation of obedient brainwashed slaves.